Hello everyone! Mafia, also known as Werewolf (to infidels, we shall not speak of them), is a game originating in real life, but adapted for a forum setting. Basically, you have a small village of innocent people, but hidden among them is a group of nasty mafiosos, whose sole goal is to have at least 50% of the population belong to their organization so that they can control the lynch-votes. Since they cannot recruit people, the only way to achieve this is bloody murder, but not more than one per night. The rest of the town uses their deductive abilities, along with some special roles, to find these infiltrators and lynch them.

Lynch Voting:xkcd Village is a lawless place, and the only form of justice is the old-fashioned lynch mob. Every "day" (this will be explained shortly), the town chooses a member to hang with a simple majority vote. For the more peaceful towns , "no lynch" is also a valid vote. After the mob has strung up the citizen, his house will be investigated overnight (it would seem reasonable to do that before the hanging, no?) and it will be announced if the town hanged a member of the mafia or an innocent townie. There are no "takebacks", once a majority vote has been reached, even for one minute, the "day" is over and the night begins.

You must bold your vote and place it on a separate line for it to my fault if I miss it and therefore do not count it in the official tally.Example: I think Vox Imperatoris is dirty mafia scum because he said he was the cop, then later said he was the doctor. NB: That would be really stupid, don't do something like that.

Vote: Vox Imperatoris

I changed my mind now, it's definitely RandomGuy.

Unvote: Vox ImperatorisVote: RandomGuy

Night—when everything else happens:People who are not just regular townies (that will be just over half of you), have special powers that are used at night. The most important of these is that of the mafia, but there are also other roles, which in this particular game will be a doctor, a cop, and a pair of masons (the secret society kind). I guarantee that no one person will have two roles.

The mafia confer through PMs at night only (this part requires the honor code, so please don't ruin the game) about whom they plan to kill; when they reach a unanimous decision, they will PM it to me and I will record it secretly. If you receive the role of a mafia member, you must try especially hard to blend in with the others and subtly place the blame elsewhere. Too little, and the lynch mob will eventually find you; try to take control of it on the first day, and the mob will start to wonder why the mafia hasn't killed you.

The cop is the most important town role because only he can definitively tell who is good and who is bad. At night, he investigates by PMing me with a name, which I return to him marked as either town-aligned or mafia-aligned. Protip: Do not tell everyone that you are the cop unless you really like to swim in concrete shoes. If you are reading closely or have played this before, you will notice that this means that the cop can't just say, "Lynch this guy because I'm the cop and I know." He has to be a bit more subtle if he wants to live.

The doctor is responsible for protecting the town from the mafia's attacks. He PMs me a name at night, and that person is safe from any attacks. However, the doctor himself is not protected, and he cannot treat himself. NB: If the cop and the doctor find each other secretly through subtle signs in their posts, teaming up can be a huge advantage as it gives the cop immunity enabling him to accuse mafiosos directly.

The pair of masons are a specially linked group. They have the ability to communicate with each other through PMs at night only, and they each know who the other is, but they have no other powers. Although the masons aren't as vital, it can be very helpful to have someone whom you can trust absolutely and talk to outside the thread, so they can form a powerful team in lynch debates.

Roles:Those who have played this before are going to want a list of exactly what roles and how many will be in the game, so here it is:12 people in all5 Townies (Plain, no powers but that of their minds and mouths)2 Masons1 Cop1 Doctor3 Mafia members (There is no godfather or other such roles in this game).

Rules:1. Do not talk about the game outside this thread.2. DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE GAME OUTSIDE THIS THREAD.3. Please stay on topic.4. Don't lurk through the whole game; if you need to drop out, I'll keep a running tab of players who want to be replacements.5. Conversely, don't spam the thread with low content posts; it's very annoying, especially for the lurkers, and it makes it hard to actually analyze you.6. If you aren't part of the game, please post in a separate, forbidden to players, thread for outside analysis.7. Once I say that it's nighttime, do not post in the thread AT ALL.8. If you die, don't say anything for the rest of the game except a simple, "Bah, you got me," which reveals no information.9. You may not post verbatim or quote from your role PM. Paraphrasing is fine.10. You may not edit your posts. This is to preempt the possibility of cheating by sending messages to other people and then editing them out.

Signing Up:I'll just be picking you on a first-come first-served basis, and once I get twelve people, I'll put the next five on a list of possible replacements.

I'd also appreciate it if you mention your status as a newbie to mafia or a veteran. Veterans are welcome, but I don't want more than 2 in this game, so I'll skip you after the first two. Please don't lie about it; if you do, I'll replace you.

The roles will be assigned randomly, with one exception, veterans will not receive "power roles". They will be guaranteed to be townies in order to prevent them from running the game themselves unintentionally. The game will also start in the day phase to give everyone at least a day of playtime. There are no time limits yet, but I may decide to implement them if the game starts dragging on forever.

ETA: Veteran players will now be grouped randomly with everyone else for distribution of power roles. I should not have mentioned that for the mafia to hear, but it's too late now.

Replacement Waiting List (Feel free to sign up in the thread):1. michaelandjimiReplacements will be used if a player requests to drop out or disappears off the face of the internet. Remember, please do not post your thoughts on the game while signing up, but feel free to create a discussion thread, if there is interest.

Macbi wrote:Surely if we all know veterans are townies they will be a bit pointless. They still get to vote, but they wont get lynched and the mafia wont take them down as they'll have better targets.

Or maybe the mafia will take them down, because if they're townies, they're known innocents.

The Mafia know who each other are, hence anyone not Mafia is known to be innocent. The Mafia will concentrate on the others, to take down the cop, doctor and Masons.

But the other innocents don't know that. For example:

In a normal game, there'd be 12 people, 3 of whom are mafia. Apart from the mafia and masons, no-one in the thread has any idea of the identity of anyone else in the thread, so if you're an innocent and you're voting for someone (at random), there's a 3/11 chance you're voting for a mafioso. Also, you can't trust anyone in the thread - a person who is providing a neat argument for another's innocence might be a mafia trying to trick you.

But if two people have been confirmed innocent before the game starts, if you're innocent and voting for someone there's a 3/8 chance you're voting for a mafia. Of course, you wouldn't just be voting at random like that, but it could also apply to questioning - there's a 3/8 chance that the person you're grilling is a mafioso. Also, there would now be two people in the game whose word could be trusted without question.

Thinking about it, though: you're probably right, at the beginning of the game at least, that attempting to take out the cop etc. is better. But it might well become more significant towards the end of the game, when the two confirmed innocents make up a larger percentage of the total voting populace. There'd be a smaller field of possible mafia candidates. Am I making sense or just waffling?

Also, I've added a new rule that's standard for forum mafia games: you may not post the role PM I give you verbatim or quote from it. Paraphrasing is, of course, fine.

The reason for this rule is that everyone can post his, and the ones that don't have the same format as the others are guaranteed to be scum. I've personally seen a game ruined this way because the bad guy's role-claim had a typo in it, so he was lynched.

Megatriorchis wrote:May I join, or is it too late? I've never played online, but I've played many times IRL.

No, you're just in time!

Registration for an opening spot is now closed.You can still sign up, but you will be on the replacement list. Since this is a newbie game, it is likely that you will still get to play because someone usually drops out.

Alright, I'm done sending PMs, so I've decided to go ahead and open the thread up.

A new day had broken on the peaceful frontier community of xkcd Village; however, this day was not like any other. In the middle of the town, the bodies of the mayor and magistrate were found dead, killed in cold blood and placed next to a sign proclaiming it to be the work of the Sicilian mafia. Now lacking a proper and civilized form of justice, the people began to assemble in the square to get to the bottom of things and obtain revenge, by the noose if necessary.

It is now Day 1.PS: Does anyone know if I can send a message, say, to all the townies, without each of them getting some kind of indication of who else received it? I didn't want to chance it with the PMs. (By the way, I used random.org to assign your roles.)

Our mayor and magistrate deal! Who could do such a terrible thing? Our only evidence is that sign. My first suspicion falls on raptors, but they'd be far to stupid to try and frame the mafia, so that means it must be one of us!

Right. Speaking first is normally a bad plan, but somebody has to do it.Please don't lynch me.Even though I use tiny text.

There are three Mafia, so we have to get one in the first three days. Otherwise, they'll have half of the remaining people and can't get lynched. We've got quite good chances, especially with the cop, but we've got to tread carefully.

Indigo is a lie.Which idiot decided that websites can't go within 4cm of the edge of the screen?There should be a null word, for the question "Is anybody there?" and to see if microphones are on.

Anyway, It's good to see that there is at least some activity when I'm awake.

Now the question is what will happen to us icebreakers

There's nothing wrong with speaking first; people tend to trust the first few people they see more than the last.

But the main reason I popped in was to say that if you have a question about anything that won't give away your role, please post it in the thread, preferably bolded so that everyone else can have it clarified, too.

I'll try to stay out of the thread from now on, except for occasional Offical Vote Counts and replies to any questions I see.

I saw as much as anyone else. The two men dead, the sign accusing the mafia. I was out walking a got to the scene early, and I can assure you that that was all there was, unless someone had hidden something before I got there.

Vox Imperatoris wrote:I'll try to stay out of the thread from now on, except for occasional Offical Vote Counts and replies to any questions I see.

If the cop asks for the identity of someone who has just been killed by the mafia that night, will you tell him, give him another chance, or what?

Indigo is a lie.Which idiot decided that websites can't go within 4cm of the edge of the screen?There should be a null word, for the question "Is anybody there?" and to see if microphones are on.

Macbi wrote:There are three Mafia, so we have to get one in the first three days. Otherwise, they'll have half of the remaining people and can't get lynched.

Not necessarily. The three-day time limit assumes we're lynching people every day. We have SIX days to figure it out if we lynch no one before that.Additionally, I feel like right now we really have no information, and that lynching someone more-or-less randomly isn't going to give us any more. Which is why I recommend we don't quite yet.

AvalonXQ wrote:Additionally, I feel like right now we really have no information, and that lynching someone more-or-less randomly isn't going to give us any more.

No lynching won't really get us any information.

How I figure it is:

Voting for (not necessarily lynching) someone and watching the reactions (the Mafia [being only 3] would lose a lot more from losing a player and would subtly try to defend their members) will give us a lot of info. The mafia have more info than us, so we should try to get more (even at the cost of a villager).

But I'm a newbie with only one day's reading up behind me. Could someone experienced please check me on this?

We have a better chance of lynching a towns person or a member of the mafia if it was random. But we're supposed to be using our detective skills aren't we?But everyones acting pretty friendly so far hmmm. Someone do something very suspicious.

I guess they're right, If someone else gets killed by the mafia tonight, it won't tell us anything, just that another person was killed. I guess we need to start some conflict, and find out who's behind this.

Well, being the first person to point out a piece of information probably doesn't bode well, but again, someone has to:

What the mafia really want is for us to go on not lynching anyone - we'll gain no information, and they'll go on each night killing people until 6 nights have passed. We're much better lynching someone at random than lynching no-one. So since it's in the mafia member's interests to not lynch people, maybe we should think about those who were so quick to vote for this option. Then again, maybe they're just kind hearted, left-wing folks who abhor capital punishment...

Yes, but what if the mafia are truely kind-hearted, left wing folk who just don't want to kill anybody ever. Can you really go around lynching people when nobody's getting killed? Which, shouldn't somebody have been killed first before we form a lynch mob? It just seems like that would be a prerequisite to lynching, unless preemptive lynching is ok. In which case, I vote to lynch, Vox Imperatoris, simply because he is in charge.

Edit: I guess it would actually help to read and realize our mayor and magistrate are dead, but I can't really say I'm sad about that. Good riddance. All they did was tax, tax, tax while the rest of us hard working folk suffered! We should probably thank the mafia for offing them! It's not like we all didn't want to anyways. And what had they done for our schools? Nothing, that's what!

Edit, edit: With both the mayor and magistrate dead I would also like to announce my candidacy in the upcoming special election fort both Magistrate and Mayor.